Again, to save yourself some PP grief, make sure whatever lights you get, are the same color temperature, or at least be prepared to gel some of them to match the others. Also, when filming indoors, change out your practical lights to match your lights you buy. It makes life so much easier when trying to set white balance, and for color correction/grading in post.

Good luck...let us know what you end up with, and post some examples!!!

cayenne

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A better question can be asked of any camera rental shop that does lighting - what's your basic kit for video. AKA what do you send out of here when you don't want a customer to b**ch and moan about the equipment not working how they expected it to.

The kit most likely would be a set of Lowel TOTA lights. Key thing to know is that they don't dim, so you're switching bulbs if you want to go between 1kw, 500w, 350w. So toss in a set of CTO and CTB filters to get your color right from the start.

LED's are nice and battery friendly, but depending on the work you are doing, they can be the most expensive method to light something.

Also, when filming indoors, change out your practical lights to match your lights you buy. It makes life so much easier when trying to set white balance, and for color correction/grading in post.

Huge detail that most folks forget about. Adding daylight (5600k) to warm (3200k) will drive you nuts in post production. Gel any other light you can see or swap the bulb to the color you're working with.

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"Me owning a lens shop is kind of like having an alcoholic bar tender." - Roger Cicala

Also, when filming indoors, change out your practical lights to match your lights you buy. It makes life so much easier when trying to set white balance, and for color correction/grading in post.

Huge detail that most folks forget about. Adding daylight (5600k) to warm (3200k) will drive you nuts in post production. Gel any other light you can see or swap the bulb to the color you're working with.

So if you're going to be shooting in daylight, what do you use for additional lighting? Thanks!

Also, when filming indoors, change out your practical lights to match your lights you buy. It makes life so much easier when trying to set white balance, and for color correction/grading in post.

Huge detail that most folks forget about. Adding daylight (5600k) to warm (3200k) will drive you nuts in post production. Gel any other light you can see or swap the bulb to the color you're working with.

So if you're going to be shooting in daylight, what do you use for additional lighting? Thanks!

Keep in mind that 'daylight' can be two different things - color temp of a light in kelvin, or actually being outside during the day. And then there is the 'golden hour'.

If you use a warm like like a TOTA, you'd use a CTB gel to change it to daylight, unless you're using it as a key light and you want to warm up your subject (aka they're pale or from Oregon). Or use a light that's balanced to daylight (for example Arri HMI). CTO and CTB gel's allow you to color correct one temp to another.

Basically you don't want a mix of the bulbs below used in the same shot.

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"Me owning a lens shop is kind of like having an alcoholic bar tender." - Roger Cicala

I went out to EVS (in Glendale) and looked at the F&V K4000 LED panels.

Nice lights, at a much better price than Litepanels. If you're looking for LED panels on a budget, it looks like these are the ones to get.

The 5600K monolight is a lot brighter than the bi-color one. And the color it gives off looked decent (plus it's easy to gel). But, compared to tungsten, I was underwhelmed with the brightness (although doubling up LED panels helps). When I considered this underwhelming brightness, combined with other shortcomings (price and color), disappointment quickly set in. It would feel weird to pay that much money for something that would be more about ease/convenience than versatility/color/brightness.

It's actually the versatility part that is my main problem with the LED panels. For key/fill light, you lose most of the light when you try to diffuse it. As I see it, these aren't designed to be diffused. It's sort of an as-is light source.

So I'm back to considering tungsten again. And what I've learned is that, until we reach the space age, you can't get a bunch of light without also getting a little bit of heat (or wallet drainage). Oh well, it was worth a try.

LED grids are also murder on the talent's eyes. Tungsten carries a lot of heat of course and 1K's can easily make people sweat. Plus you can easily overload a circuit breaker with Tungsten, which wastes most of its energy in the IR (heat) band, and the bulbs burn out fairly quickly so you need spares.

There is no ideal video light but tungsten is definitely the best looking and easiest to grade in post. For lighting up a green screen use fluorescents, the green spike helps in that case.

Get a combination as per your budget. You can buy them pretty cheap from China on eBay. You get what you pay for though. I've used some of those Chinese redheads - just don't use the cheap globes they come with - they don't last long and melt over their connectors! Use high quality globes (GE/Osram/Philips) and you'll have few problems.

You will find yourself steadily building a collection of lights. I use all kinds of lights now - Par56s, LEDs, chinese balls, homemade scoops - you name it.

Funnily enough, for most of my short films I tend to fall back to a 800w Redhead, 300w Fresnel and a 300w PAR56 (as a kicker). I just like that light combo!

If you were just starting out with video and needed an inexpensive lighting kit for indoor shooting... what would it be?

Thanks!

I'd go for a Ianiro 3 lamps + 3m stands + bag set: http://www.ianiro.com/The 3x800w cost 800 $ (that's the set I bought when I started) but the 3x500w set should cost around 500 $, so it should be in your price range. And there's always the "hand market"...Tungsten light is the kind of artificial light I like most. Discharge lamps are very heavy and expensive, while led lights are not beautiful at all (to me) and the led frequency could cause some flickering trouble with some shutter speeds if you'r not using very good (and expensive) lamps.I worked even with several cheap corean and chinese tungsten lamps, but their built and contacts quality was always terrible, I definitely wouldn't recommend them.The downsides of tungsten lamps are 3:1- They are much bigger than led lights.2- They need much more power than led and discharge lamps to produce the same amount of light.3- If you need to mix them with natural light (unless it's sunset light...) you'll need to convert them with a gel, which means that you have to buy a lot of blue gels and that, using blue conversion gels, you're gonna loose a lot of lighting power.

Can anyone recommend a good book on the topic (video lighting)? Clearly there's a bit more of a learning curve that I anticipated.

Read the bible.... "Set Lighting Technicians Handbook". Until you understand all types of light, you cannot sit down and talk about experience with one type of light, because you have NO reference.

LEDs were never meant to have punch. They are designed for headshot type videos where your crop is so tight that you can move the light in close. Most of the newer LED panel types these days carry the diffusion plates that will soften the light up and make it more pleasant to look at.

In regards to matching up lights... there is absolutely no rule about that. In regards to post, well... if you chose to mix lights in the first place, you probably have a reason and wont need to match them up in post.I kinda like a 3400K/4000K indoor setting, light with 3200K lights and have the daylight do color contrast in the background.

Each light serves a diferent purpose.

Oh and gelling... gelling LEDs is a lot different from gelling tungsten, flour or HMIs. The color spectrum is still not perfect and gelling could create problems with the already present spikes in the spectrum.

But I would just test the lights rigth away, make sure they match up. If not, then return the crap and get a new set.

Regarding power.... yeah, proper batteries for LEDs are expensive. They will, including charger, set you back as much as the K4000 ligths. But only needed if you are doing shoots where you can't draw power.

Read the bible.... "Set Lighting Technicians Handbook". Until you understand all types of light, you cannot sit down and talk about experience with one type of light, because you have NO reference.

Thanks for the heads-up on this book. I just grabbed it.

After considering tungsten, then LED, and then back to tungsten... I finally decided to go with some fluorescents.

The primary factor was cost: fluorescent is cheap.

The second factor was brightness: fluorescent can definitely pack some punch.

The third factor was heat: my apartment already gets hot as it is (no AC).

The trick with fluorescent is to get the right bulbs and to be ready to do some color correction in post. I am the first to admit that most fluorescent bulbs give off crap light (often accompanied by a flicker and/or green/blue/purple spikes). I had to ditch some bulbs because they flickered and had a purple spike. But I've been doing my homework and I've already found one bulb that I'm reasonably happy with (Eiko 105w); and more are on the way (Alzo). My only major complaint is how hard it is to find 5000k bulbs (my preferred color temp) with a CRI over 90. It seems like their are a lot more options at 5500k and 5600k.

Another bonus about fluorescents is their power draw. It feels good to be efficient and I'm actually using some of these bulbs for everyday house lighting (I prefer white light over yellow).

Having said all that, when my budget permits I will definitely be ordering some tungsten lamps to get better quality light. But for now I'm still learning and I'd like to see how far I can go with fluorescent.

I know this won't be the most powerful/sexy light kit. But whatever I lose in light quality... I should get back with other benefits: low temperature in my no-AC-having L.A. apartment, super easy to move and pack, and low power draw. The only thing I'm not sure about is color. But as long as the colors aren't noticeably bad, I'm okay with it.

I'm not looking for the ultimate/perfect lights. I just want something that gets me in the ballpark of good quality, and isn't a buzzkill to use. I feel like tungsten would be too much of a hassle for the type of shooting I'll be doing. The heat alone sounds awful. And for on-the-go, it would also be a pain in the ass.

Any thoughts?

There are china made non-branded ones that cost USD100-200. go and search around. Also some 30W-50W LED garden flood light are quite affordable. approx 70 USD?